PyPI vs. RPM Package Manager vs. Wing Python IDE vs. broot Comparison Chart

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful package management system capable of building computer software from the source into easily distributable packages; installing, updating, and uninstalling packaged software; querying detailed information about the packaged software, whether installed or not; and verifying the integrity of packaged software and resulting software installation. The package’s metadata is stored in the RPM header. The header is a binary data structure that stores single pieces of data in tags. Each tag has a pre-defined meaning and data type. These are not stored in the header itself but need to be known by the code reading the header. In the header, the tags are only referred to by their number. Each tag is either of a plain scalar type or is an array of one of these types. While not enforced by the type system the RPM code assumes that tags belonging together have the same number of entries.

The ROOT data analysis framework is used much in High Energy Physics (HEP) and has its own output format (.root). ROOT can be easily interfaced with software written in C++. For software tools in Python there exists pyROOT. Unfortunately, pyROOT does not work well with python3.4. broot is a small library that converts data in python numpy ndarrays to ROOT files containing trees with a branch for each array. The goal of this library is to provide a generic way of writing python numpy datastructures to ROOT files. The library should be portable and supports both python2, python3, ROOT v5 and ROOT v6 (requiring no modifications on the ROOT part, just the default installation). Installation of the library should only require a user to compile to library once or install it as a python package.